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Family Circus, 4/14/17

The Family Circus has decades of art to plunder for self-plagiarism, something it does with abandon. Some panels lend themselves to reuse more easily than others! This one, for instance. Anytime you’ve got a joke that’s “Jeffy says some hilariously dumbass thing that he and everyone else should be profoundly embarrassed about”? This, with Jeffy staring blank and guileless at nothing in particular, is your go-to panel.

Hi and Lois, 4/14/17

If Chip can’t focus on his schoolwork, he should request a seat move. Maybe someone a little less distractible would do better sitting next to the school’s only window.

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Mary Worth, 4/11/17

It’s a good thing that Mary and Toby aren’t the kind of friends and travel companions who feel like they have to do everything together, because they obviously have very different interests. Mary, for instance, enjoys looking out over the waves thinking quietly to herself, “I love the sea! You know, in the abstract. I’m not going to swim in it or anything. It’s full of monsters!” Meanwhile, Toby is in the ship’s gym, running in place with a bunch of other workout nuts, shouting “It’s fun to stay at ♫ the Y-M-C-A! ♪” at the top of her lungs. They’re not playing the song on the gym soundsystem or anything and she’s not, it goes without saying, staying at the YMCA. She just likes yelling things.

Mark Trail, 4/11/17

Meanwhile, over in Mark Trail, things are taking a much grittier and more realistic turn than in the high-seas fantasy world of Mary Worth. “It has proven to be a good career for me to provide for my family!” says Mark, unaware that, even as he tussles with this illiterate gunman, back in New York analysts at the private equity firm that recently took over Woods and Wildlife Magazine’s near-bankrupt parent company are going over the books and discovering some truly hair-raising numbers. “So, this guy is on the payroll as a full-time employee with benefits, but he files maybe three, four stories a year? And he’s tied to the company’s skyrocketing insurance premiums? Well, first thing we do is shift him to contractor status. And we won’t need any more of these 12,000-word essays about ferrets or whatever; he’s welcome to send us some clickbait ‘You won’t BELIEVE which National Monuments have the most celebrity nude sunbathers’ slideshows for $250 a pop. OK, with that taken care of, let’s look at our spending on office space — I think there’s a lot of savings we can find there, too.”

Family Circus, 4/11/17

Oh, man, Billy is definitely just one step away from “and why isn’t there a WHITE history month????” right now.

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Pluggers, 4/4/17

Sometimes the point of Pluggers just seems to be “pluggers are old,” which, you know, nothing wrong with that, we’re all going to be old someday, if all goes to plan. These gags generally take the form of “Old pluggers have assumptions and cultural references that are now forgotten by younger people.” Today’s panel takes a somewhat different tack: this plugger looks just as baffled at the concept of “5 ¢ Milky Ways” as any indie-rock-addled hipster youth. The difference, I suppose, is that a young person would’ve downloaded their recipe from a fancy website to their iPhone or whatever, whereas the plugger is in touch with the long, unbroken chain of knowledge that goes back generations, preserving and copying these manuscripts dutifully like a medieval monk, even if they don’t fully understand it.

Six Chix, 4/4/17

Who says there’s nothing new under the sun? I would’ve thought sci-fi writers over the past century or so had already rather exhaustively detailed all the problems with time travel: you step on a butterfly and turn America fascist, you go back to meet Jesus and accidentally become Jesus, you have sex with some lady and become your own grandfather, etc. But nope, Six Chix has discovered something new: don’t you hate it when you think you’re going to the Renaissance or to our spacefaring future, but you just end up in some lady’s uterus, leaving her torso grotesquely distorted? We never should’ve meddled in the mysteries of the timestream!

Family Circus, 4/4/17

Look at those impossibly cheery faces! Definitely, definitely this involves murder somehow.